Sargent, John Singer

Claude Monet Painting at the Edge of a Wood

1887; Tate Gallery, London

If not one of the
Impressionists,
Sargent was certainly an adherent
of the movement. The derision aroused by his portrait of Madame
Gautreau when exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1884 interrupted what
might have been a close connection with French art and led him to
make London his headquarters as a portrait painter. But he
contributed to the establishment of an insular offshoot of
Impressionism in the New English Art Club, of which he was one of the
founder members in 1886, and sought to arouse interest in
Monet's
work for America. He had the greatest admiration for Monet and was
influenced in his own style by the French master. At the time he
painted this portrait he had recently bought one of Monet's
paintings,
Rock at Tréport.

The portrait was painted in the spring of 1888 at Giverny where Monet
had gone to live not long before. The wife of his former patron, Mme
Ernest Hoschedé, whom Monet had befriended and who was to become his
second wife, appears at the right of the picture. Sargent had not
attempted the translation of light and shade into terms of pure color
in the essentially Impressionist fashion but indicates the splashes
of sunlight through the trees with his own vivacity, and his capacity
for the brilliant sketch is well exemplified in the figures.